“When we follow our curiosity…and take small steps towards that curiosity, that’s how we create possibilities for ourselves and for others.” -Van Lai-DuMone

In this episode of the Control the Room Podcast, Van Lai-DuMone and I unpack the creative footprint that inspired her to dedicate her life’s work at worksmART to uncover creativity in every organization. Van shares her observations on the creativity disconnect she’s seen unfold in the corporate workforce and how teams can reignite collective creativity in their work. She highlights her go-to creativity strategies that demonstrate trying a “different” approach in the workplace and the significance of discovering creative artifacts for teams. Van and I discuss the transformative impact a strong collaboration flow has on teams when working on projects/ideas as well as when coordinating virtual and in-person events and meetings. We specifically speak to how organizations must prioritize connection in both the virtual & physical landscapes to make a successful shift to hybrid work, and the need for intentionality in daily workplace interactions in order to provide space for real connection in organizations. Listen in to hear Van’s perspective on her journey to living a life in creativity and rediscovering your organization’s creative niche.    

Show Highlights

[10:40] Van’s Career Journey & the Creativity Spark 
[13:26] The Creativity Disconnect in Corporate America
[17:42] Van’s Creative Strategies in the Workplace
[28:41] The Flow Effect
[34:48] Creating Connection in the Virtual & Physical Landscape
[43:09] Van’s Hybrid Work Perspective & Final Thoughts

Links | Resources

Van’s LinkedIn

WorksmART

What If? The Life-Changing Power of Curiosity & Courage

About the Guest

Van Lai-DuMone is the founder of WorksmART, a progressive team and leadership development company, where she invites clients to think with their hands and use right brain creative tools to disrupt traditional training methods. Van’s work proposes that we all innately possess curiosity and creativity, that good ideas can come from any level of an organization, and that all organizations should continuously cultivate idea-sharing in the workplace to foster creativity. Van formerly studied Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and earned her MBA from Pepperdine University. She has over 15 years of corporate and start-up experience with leading companies across industries, including Google, LinkedIn, and Pandora. Her mission is to continue to help workplaces everywhere implement creativity as a pivotal core value.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through facilitation certifications, workshops, and events. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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Full Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room, means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our weekly Control the Room facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab.

Douglas Ferguson:

If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings, you can download the Magical Meetings Quick Start Guide, your free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide.

Douglas Ferguson:

Today, I’m with Van Lai-DuMone, founder of worksmART, where she disrupts traditional corporate training with creativity. Her goal is to make crayons a staple office supply, and she is also TEDx speaker and advocate for the veteran community. Welcome to the show Van.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Hello, Douglas. Very nice to see you here today and I’m glad to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

Excellent. Yeah, it was great to have you. So let’s just hear a little bit about how you got your start, and how did you get this obsession with crayons?

Van Lai-DuMone:

So I got my start, I’m going to go way back to early childhood, I’ve always been really creative. I would never have called myself an artist, I was never professionally trained as artist, I was just always creating things. My mom would buy me a shirt or shoes, I would instantly rip it up with a pair of scissors or color them with paint. And she was not too pleased with that but that’s just how I’ve always been.

Van Lai-DuMone:

In college, I started a small business, I can’t even call it a business, I think I just went to garage sales, bought furniture, strip them and repainted them and sold them to my friends. So creativity is always been a part of my life, but because of my upbringing I followed a very traditional path of going to school, going to college, getting my MBA, and just going into the corporate world.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And I ebbed and flowed between the corporate world and entrepreneurial startup ventures for about 15 years. I think it was because I never felt I was in the right place, I was always looking for where I belonged. So it wasn’t until about six years ago that was working for a large pharmaceutical company. And I really found myself in a place where I’m like, “This is 100% not for me. How did I get here? I need to make a drastic change.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

And it was also the time where my son was born. And between those two things coming to that realization, having him being born, looking at this little child and thinking, “I want him to grow up with a mom that’s doing something she loves.” So I went back to this idea I had several years ago around starting a business, around bringing creativity into the workplace and that’s where worksmART started.

Van Lai-DuMone:

But even back then, it wasn’t called worksmART, it was called Craftivity Events. I was trying to sell workshops into corporations called Weave of Dreams or Follow Your Heart, right? Which I was not doing so well, so I hunger back down, revisited it, really kind of thought about like, “What am I really trying to do in the workplace?” And redeveloped it into what it is now, bringing creativity into team development and leadership training in the corporate environment.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s amazing. And so I guess I’m curious, you told this story about being very creative as a young child, and then you jumped to getting the MBA and then kind of being in the corporate world and clocking in and clocking out and maybe being a little disconnected from the creativity, at least that’s what it seemed like.

Douglas Ferguson:

And so when did the creativity disconnect first started to happen? When did you feel that way in, was it gradual? Was it sudden? Like what was that like?

Van Lai-DuMone:

That’s an interesting question, Douglas, because I don’t really think I’ve thought about that before. And I remember still being very creative in college and even into parts of my career, still painting on the side or do some creative things. But I think it was really getting into the corporate world and starting to climb the ladder of the corporate experience and really being focused on that, that not only was it not creative in the workplace but I stopped being creative in my personal life too.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And that really was where I found the need for creativity. So I think possibly if I had remained creative in my personal life, I may have not needed as much in my professional career, but it’s almost a blessing that I did because it really got me support. I was like, “Wow, if I’m feeling this way, how many other people are feeling this way in about their work?” Where there’s no creativity where creativity is, is limited to the people in marketing or whatever department people consider normally creative, but why can’t people in the accounting department have some creativity there?

Van Lai-DuMone:

Now, maybe people will argue that, maybe you shouldn’t be that creative in accounting, but you know what I mean?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. Well, people have certainly gotten into a lot of trouble with creative accounting-

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yes, that’s true.

Douglas Ferguson:

… practices, but maybe they could be a little playful in how they collaborate and how they communicate with each other, for sure. So this really gets into one of our meeting mantras around embrace the child’s mind. And really big fan of Daniel Coyle’s book, The Culture Code, where he talks about, one of the examples he gave us a Stanford study that looked at this creativity exercise and how kindergartners did such a better than CEOs and then he tried the engineers and designers, and then even a cross-functional group of professionals. Yet, the kindergartners repeatedly did better.

Douglas Ferguson:

And then what you were just telling me really reinforced this argument, because he says that the reason that those groups struggle so much is that they spend so much of their time trying to understand their position as it relates to the group. And so it’s all politics, right? And so, and you talked about climbing the ladder, and I imagine that the more you climb the ladder the more political things get, the more you had to be concerned about navigating those types of things.

Douglas Ferguson:

And it can be all consuming and it can rewire your brain. And so I think that it’s not surprising that it’s hard to keep up even the creativity in your personal life.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yeah, and that really resonates with what you just said, Douglas, because I feel that as you climb up the corporate ladder and as you get higher up in organizations, you should be taking more risks, but you don’t, it’s almost the opposite.

Van Lai-DuMone:

You stop taking risks and creativity is about taking risks. So you really do lose your creativity or your willingness to be more creative or your willingness to take more risks as the stakes become higher for your career.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s interesting. It’s like we often see that with folks that are maybe about to make tenure or they’re thinking about their legacy or they’re like, it’s only one year until I retired, do I really want to rock the boat here?

Douglas Ferguson:

And if there’s not already a very rich culture of experimentation and curiosity and risk taking, that’s really hard for folks to go out on a limb in those situations.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Absolutely. And I do hear that with some of my clients who will come to a workshop about how to bring creativity in the workplace and we teach them these innovative tools on problem-solving and brainstorming. And they’ll say they love it but I don’t feel like I can bring this in the workplace because I’m afraid it won’t be accepted.

Douglas Ferguson:

So let’s talk about that a little bit, because I hear that often too. What are some of your go-to strategies when you hear that from the participant in one of these workshops, what do you tell them? How do you coach them through navigating that?

Van Lai-DuMone:

Well, sometimes tell me like, just start with yourself, right? I think the more confident you are on the tools, the more likely you are willing to spread the word about it. So rather than bringing some of these tools around creative problem solving to a group to start with, do it on your own. These tools are meant to be done individually or collectively, so try some of the tools just on your own.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And as you see how effective they are, you’re more likely now, and we’re willing to go and tell other people about it. So have the experience for yourself first so that you can have the confidence and competence to go out there and share it. The other thing I tell people is, don’t use the word creative, don’t use the word creative, just go out and say, “We’re going to try something different today.” And here it is.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that, Van. One of the things I think that goes hand in hand with that is I coach people on, don’t tell them the name of the activity because a lot of these activities have like fun, creative names that are meant to be almost like, “Oh, it’s just branding, right? If an activity has a really clever, witty name, you’re going to remember it.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, that’s going to get you into trouble when you got a group of naysayers and you’re like, “Okay, we’re going to do how might we’s or whatever,” it’s like just start doing it. Just tell them how to do it and we get them doing it. So they don’t have a name to fight against or whatever, or a thing to like push against.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And that I learned that, I was mentioning, the first iteration of my business was called Craftivity Events and I was trying to force feed workshops to organizations called Weave of Dreams. And now I do the same, I do those Weave of Dreams workshops, but they don’t call that it’s around values, it’s around narrowing values and collaborating on values and seeing how values impact the workplace.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And also the idea of creative artifacts, a lot of my work is around visual arts. We do our workshops and at the end we’ll often do a creative art project as an anchor back to the work we did that day. I no longer call them creative art projects, they’re called creative artifacts now. And all of a sudden companies like, “Ooh, we need artifacts.” They didn’t need the creative art project, they need the creative artifact.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s right. And I think it’s interesting that you mentioned values a second ago, and it’s not just about language, it’s about values. And it’s a bit meta because you were talking about, they were using these tools to focus on creating shared values, but at the end of the day, an executive or any member of a workshop has things they value. And if you can align your language to things they value, or if you can align the work to things they value, they’re going to embrace it a lot more.

Douglas Ferguson:

And so if there are things that they’re afraid of, that they maybe don’t value as much, that’s going to be a hard sell.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Absolutely. And here’s the thing I learned to do as I started working with more clients is, know who you’re talking to. Like exactly what you’re saying, know your clients, so visit their websites. In my proposals, I often am sprinkling in words I found from their website that correlate to what I do, but in their language.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s right, I love that. And so I want to come back to, you mentioned in your work that you do a problem solving type of activities, et cetera. Can you give some examples of like how you’re helping teams going to embark on this creative work and what some of these kind of tools might look like?

Van Lai-DuMone:

Certainly, I mean, it’s hard because a lot of them are visual, but like a common one is from improv the yes, and method where we are talking, when you’re coming up with ideas rather than saying no, but, or what I talk about is like the idea of killing ideas before they have a chance.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So oftentimes in a meeting room, you will ask a question and people, someone will give an answer or someone will give an idea, and the next person says no, but, or yes, but. Either way, whether it’s a no, but, or yes, but, what you do is you’re killing the idea before it has a chance.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So this yes, and principle, as you know is this idea of letting people share their idea and the next person has to say yes, and, an add to the idea. But I think the overall, rather than share like individuals like the overall premise of the work I do in creative problem solving is the concept that you want to give everyone a chance to have their voice heard in a way that makes sense for them.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So again, going back to that conference room, you’re in this meeting room, the lead person asks a question, let’s come up with ideas for X, Y, or Z. And we all know these people too, you have those two or three people who have all the ideas, they’re going to continue to raise their hand and give ideas.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And then you have the rest of us, like me who are actually introverts and I don’t think that way, I can’t come up with ideas off the top of my head. For several reasons, number one, that’s not the way I think. And number two, I don’t want to sound stupid, I want to think about my ideas before I state them out loud.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So with creative problem solving, creative thinking, with visual tools what you’re able to do is give everyone access to ways to share their ideas in a way that makes sense for them. So some examples for that might be okay, so you asked your question, now I’m going to play classical music for 10 minutes. Think about your ideas and write them down.

Van Lai-DuMone:

There’s Legos in front of you, build your ideas, you sketch your idea. So for people who have their ways of thinking to be able to share ideas, rather than just saying, speak them out loud right now.

Douglas Ferguson:

I really liked that. And one of my favorite go-to is just getting people in the small groups to combat some of the like over talkers or people that are having trouble sharing or talking. And one of my favorite prompts that I learned from the awesome and great Keith McCandless is when you come back from a small group activity and you now are in the big group, again, asking the group, “What is something that everybody must hear?”

Van Lai-DuMone:

Oh, I like that. Yes.

Douglas Ferguson:

Right? Because you ask people like, “What did you hear that’s interesting?” Or like, “Anyone want to share anything they heard?” But it was like, “What is something that everyone must hear?” It’s like really provocative from the sense of like, “Oh yeah. The thing Van told me, people need to hear that.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

Right, because you know in those small groups, people have that thought like, “Ooh, that was good. That was good.” I wish people could know this. And so you give them the opportunity to share that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s really good.

Van Lai-DuMone:

I’m using that one too, Douglas. I’m going to take that one from you.

Douglas Ferguson:

I know. That’s one of the beautiful things about facilitation and creating communities of practice is that we can all share because there’s cool techniques and cool prompts that just kind of work, and just add little nuggets to our toolkit.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yeah. And that’s why I love that Voltage Control and that community, because I was having a conversation with someone the other day. I have no idea who it was, but they were talking about the communities I built on in this work I thought the beauty…

Van Lai-DuMone:

Oh, you know what it was, there’s a conflict management course I teach and we talk about, people do a survey and it’s about… What am I talking about? This was for your facilitator… What’s the Thursday thing? Facilitator…

Douglas Ferguson:

Oh yeah, facilitation lab.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Okay. For facilitation lab, I did this conflict management course for facilitation lab, and what I had to do before was a survey around what is your go-to conflict resolution style? And there’s five of them, one of them is competitive. And what was so interesting is that this was a group of facilitators, nobody had chosen competitive.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And I thought that was so interesting because it says so much about this community of facilitators, because we are also willing to share and help each other and just share ideas.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s pretty phenomenal. Also, I feel like that’s in the water here in Austin. It’s like, there’s such a sense of helpfulness and just in the ecosystem and the community. And I really appreciate it. I think that it tends to create better results than to be super competitive or super, I don’t know, restrictive or exclusive.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And it’s interesting because I feel like where else do you find that? It’s an interesting dynamic between facilities, even though we all most of us have our own businesses, running our own thing. Yet, everyone is still willing to share and collaborate.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think it’s also a passion for the work and how we elevate, I would say, the practice or the discipline. And the more we share about what we’re learning and what we’re noticing allows us all to elevate it as a form of leadership, because the more people that do it, the better off we are. It’s almost like capitalizing society, right? The more people that do it and they get good at, the more that we can… It’ll raise the GDP.

Van Lai-DuMone:

That’s right, yes. It raises the value for all of us.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s right.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And then on the other side of it too, is that the way I look at it as well is, when I started my business, there was a lot of hoarding, right? “Oh, yes, you want me to do a workshop on how to file your taxes? Sure. I’m going to tell you that out.” I was like, there’s so much like I will do anything anyone wants me to do, I would learn it and try to do it. But as my business grew, and as I saw impact on clients by collaborating, most of the work I do now is through collaboration because really the goal is to bring the highest value to the client, and if I can’t do it, I’m going to bring someone on who can.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s awesome. And so that brings me to a topic that we spoke about earlier and it was this idea of flow. And I want to talk about flow in general, but it also might be interesting to examine it from the perspective of creating flow with a collaborator, because I’ve certainly found collaborators that I can instantly get into the flow with, whereas others it’s been more difficult.

Douglas Ferguson:

And I really treasure the ones where it’s just almost instantaneous, you don’t work with them for a year and you come back together and it’s almost like we just took a coffee break and we came back, right?

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yes. So when I talk about flows, I went on this retreat, or I should say it was a weekend with Cairn Leadership Strategies, they’re based in San Diego. And they take people on weekend, three-day outdoor adventures and there’s leadership topics that we discussed. So it was interesting, so I went on the Black Canyon River canoeing trips, and then our topic was flow, so that just flowed nicely.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And what we talked about was this idea of like, how do you find flow in your life? And for me, it’s always been this idea of, it’s always been accidental for me, so there’s always been this idea of like, “Oh my gosh, how did all these hours pass? I’ve been doing all this work and let the hours just went so quickly and I got a lot accomplished.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

But what I learned in this trip and in their lessons about flow is that you can actually stack these triggers to find your flow. So there apparently is a psychological triggers, social triggers and environmental triggers.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And under each of those categories, there’s things you can do. So what I’ve been trying to do now is like, “Okay, if I want to get in flow, what psychological trigger can I put in place right now?” Something like, I’m going to focus on something that demands all my attention.

Van Lai-DuMone:

A social trigger might be something like it has to be familiar enough for me, or be in a familiar space but make it a little bit challenging. And then environmental flow might be something like create a rich environment, play music in the background. So if I stack those triggers, I’m more likely to get myself into this state of flow.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So we asked about doing that in collaboration with someone, that’s a really interesting topic because it’s that something that just comes naturally and I wonder, and I haven’t tried this, I wonder if you can stat triggers to get into a better collaboration. For those that you’re saying is not as natural.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I think the question then becomes, do we share the same triggers?

Van Lai-DuMone:

That’s right.

Douglas Ferguson:

And do we value the same things? And then that also make me think a little bit about this notion of group flow and how like, when we were having events in person, this notion that we would really think intentionally about the initial conditions or the environment we wanted to create, so that everything was easy and everything flowed. And so how’s the room organized? Do we have round tables or square tables? How many chairs do we have? Do we have chairs? Is there a projector? Where is it located? Do we have music? Where’s the food going to be?

Douglas Ferguson:

All these kind of questions around how we organize the space and how we layout groups and thinking about, even the flow of the event will directly impact how people can go in and out of flow states.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yeah. So because I didn’t really do, most of you guys do a lot of events. So my events were basically facilitating workshops at corporations at someone’s office. So I didn’t always have complete control over what that looked and felt like, but I tried my best. But you have more experience in that sense, I feel like what I do was learn how to do that virtually.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So you may help me be able to take some of your experience in a live setting, it’d be like, “Okay, so here are all the elements that we want to recreate virtually.” And that’s interesting, so I kind of went to the virtual environment thinking I cannot take what I was doing in-person and just throw that into a virtual environment.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So how do I recreate that same idea of flow, that same feeling of collectiveness and comradery in a virtual environment? And for me over the last year, a little more than year now, what I found around that is first preparation or setting expectations, and setting expectations for what we need the audience to do, keep your camera on, get ready to participate, here might be some pre-work.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And then within the facilitation, making sure those transitions were really smooth, and making sure that we had a many different elements for people to connect, whether that’s, it wasn’t all like, “Okay, throw things in the chat. Okay, here’s seven breakout rooms.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

It was like, “Okay, let’s throw a breakout room here, that makes sense. Now, let’s have people postings for this exercise. Now, let’s have everyone, few people share out loud to the whole group here. And I found that to be really interesting to navigate and try to figure out during this time like what worked, what didn’t work.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And I think in terms of facilitation and when I talk about… or not even facilitation, even when I work with clients who run their own meetings, is this idea of giving people dedicated time and giving, and being really intentional, intentional in this virtual environment, about giving people time to connect, because that’s what I mean… I was at Control the Room live in Austin two years ago and there was the way the room was laid out, there was food where the food and drinks were and the way there was time and space made for connection really made a difference.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And if we’re not doing that in a virtual environment, then we lose out on so much.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s right. We don’t want to make those things victims of a shift in space. All right, like we’re shifted to this virtual space so we can’t lose sight of what are the core kind of principles that we need to live by, and the connection is one of them.

Douglas Ferguson:

As facilitators, we have to establish connection and it’s certainly bubbled up right at the beginning of the pandemic. We held events for facilitators to come, it was almost like group therapy for facilitators which is actually the precursor for a facilitation lab and that came up big time. It was two big themes, one was just like real concern about how do we foster connection and then will it be lost? And then there was a concern around, will we be able to support this digital divide and lack of access kind of thing?

Van Lai-DuMone:

I get that, yeah. And how has that been? What have you seen from what you’ve developed?

Douglas Ferguson:

The lack of access thing is one that has to be handled on a case by case basis, like to your point earlier about knowing your audience and who’s showing up who could be there, who’s being left out, who is being excluded because of circumstances and how do we include them either by sending them devices or providing a space that they can go to, to connect in, or even just like reducing the fidelity.

Douglas Ferguson:

Do we make this a phone call so that they can participate in some way? So I think it’s just designing around those constraints and understanding that they’re there. And then as far as the connection piece, I think it’s everything you were just describing around just making it a focus and being intentional about it.

Douglas Ferguson:

And quite often, that might involve things like energizers, icebreakers, et cetera. And we always advise when you’re doing those things, ideally tie them into the purpose of the intent of the event. So it’s not just, it doesn’t feel like, “Oh, why are we doing this thing? Let’s connect it in to the work that we’re doing, but give time for people to connect and to build some rapport and understanding.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yes, I love that point too because I think it is always important to make those connections and those transitions so that they… It just makes sense, so people just think, “I’m just doing this exercise to do this exercise,” but make them meaningful. I think that’s where facilitators can really make a difference is in terms of like building those icebreakers, those energizers.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So that it’s really about creating a way for people to build personal connections to each other, rather than just having fun. And I often talk about team building versus team development, I think it’s the same thing, like team building, let’s have fun together, let’s get together, and whatever might be. Like clearing out virtually like go bowling, or go on a scavenger hunt.

Van Lai-DuMone:

But for me, these energizers, you’re talking about more like team development where like, “How do we have fun together?” But we’re also using the time to get to know each other better and get to know how to work well with each other.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think to me the best way to define the differences about the half-life. So team building exercises have a very short half-life, team development has a much longer half-life, because we’ve actually become more intentional about doing things that are going to have lasting value because we created some deeper connection.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s going to be a lot harder to evaporate or like just pull apart or tease the part. It’s almost like weed in a basket that’s real tight versus the one that’s really loose. Is it going to come apart or is it going to stay together?

Van Lai-DuMone:

That great. There’s an exercise I’ve done in person, I haven’t… But now that I’m like I finally started using mural, and big thanks to you guys too, I kind of like, “Okay, if I’m going to be facilitating facilitation lab and doing, and uses like a a mural,” but there’s an exercise that you do in person that it was yarn.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And have you heard of Climer Cards, making use any pictures you can just like, I just threw a bunch of pictures on the floor and I had people pick a picture that represents something about you outside the work you do. They’d pick a picture up, someone will start with a ball of yarn, and they would say what their picture means. So they had a picture of a farmhouse, I would say, like, “I picked the picture of the farmhouse because I want to live on a farm one day.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

And if that resonated with anyone, they would raise their hand, you hold onto the yarn, throw it to each person who has their hand up. And by the time you’re done, you have this big yarn weaves, it’s a visual representation of all the connections in the room. And it was one of the most powerful exercises I did because you’ve found connections you would never talk about in the workplace.

Van Lai-DuMone:

There was one organization I worked with where this young man, he was probably 22, 23, you picked the picture of a car and said, “I love to restore old classic cars.” And there’s other woman on the other side of the room, late 60’s, like me too. Like where were those who have ever had that connection? And I guarantee you, next time she walks past her desk, they’re having a conversation. Next time he emails her, she’s probably used that email a lot, a little bit faster than she would have before.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s really cool. And so what do you call this?

Van Lai-DuMone:

It was on my Weave of Dreams, I have no idea. No, I don’t.

Douglas Ferguson:

Weave of Dreams.

Van Lai-DuMone:

That isn’t what my Weave of Dreams. Weave of Dreams was around values, that on I don’t know what I called it. I think it was just like connections exercise.

Douglas Ferguson:

Cool, yeah. And I love that the yarn is like, there’s this thing around the connections that were made. So like, even as we moved on and there’s new connections getting made, you can still look back to like, “Oh yeah, I remember this connection now.” You can almost take a photo of it too and you’ve got like these lines, like you’ve got these indicators of like, “Well, the connections are amazing, that’s really cool.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

So speaking of that, I think of mural is now that I’m thinking about that could be a really interesting way to capture it because on mural what you can have are those images, the image that they selected on the mural board. So then you can really just have an artifact of who picked that image and where the connections are.

Douglas Ferguson:

It makes me think like one way to do it is like, if you trapped in a bunch of images into your mural, and so you got, I don’t know, 30 people dropping 30 images, and then you can use their alignment tool. So you could say align left and align top, and now they’re stacked all on top of each other.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Oh, interesting.

Douglas Ferguson:

And then you could like create like a circle of people and you go, “All right, starting with Susan, we’re going to go clockwise. So Susan, do you get the first image?” And you can even put like someone on top of the stack, so they wouldn’t get to see what’s there until you get started.

Douglas Ferguson:

And then they drag it over and then they each drag one, and then you could draw the connections after you… Anyway, that would be kind of fun. The Climer Cards, you mentioned those briefly, were those kind of cool thought starter cards?

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yeah. So Amy Climer, she’s a consultant, she works in the similar work where in bringing creativity into the workplace, and creative thinking, creative problem solving. And she watercolor acrylic painted, I don’t know, these cards, and they’re just like a deck of cards. And on each card there’s just a watercolor picture, whether it’s as a fish or farmhouse, whatever it is.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And it’s just this, they’re so simple you wouldn’t think like, “Well, where are these four?” But you can use them for so many things for storytelling, for activities like this on connection, because with visual images what’s amazing about them is that people read them differently. We all see things through our own perspective, our own lens.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So, a school of fish on a watercolor school of fish and a card to me is might mean something completely different to you. Not mine most likely will mean something completely different to you. So it was a great way to use a visual tool to see other people’s perspectives.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s cool, I love it. So I want to come back to something you mentioned earlier around these kind of pivots and the shifts, and we had to make a big shifts. Gosh, was it 18 months ago now or embarking on what might be another shift with hybrid as people start to think about going back to work and hosting meetings that may or may not include people that are in person and remote?

Douglas Ferguson:

And we’d just released our hybrid work guide which has some thinking in it. I’d love to hear what’s on your mind with regards to having to support this. And when we spoke earlier before the show, you were mentioning that you haven’t had to do much of this yet. But it’s always interesting to hear like how people are processing, what might be coming. And I think other facilitators might find it comforting just to hear some of your perspective on like, “Gosh, what is this going to mean for me?”

Douglas Ferguson:

So what are some of the questions you’re asking yourself right now, as it relates to having to start to maybe hold some hybrid sessions?

Van Lai-DuMone:

Well, it’s interesting because I think this past year has taught me to really embrace ambiguity, and all of us have had to make that shift. So I remember when we first went into lockdown, I’m part of this little consultant group and I remember being on the phone with everyone in Zoom with them saying like, “I’m not doing anything on Zoom, I’m just waiting,” I’m like, “I have no desire to do anything virtually. I’m just going to wait until things go back to normal.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

And about two months into, I’m like, “Okay, maybe I should be doing something differently.” And clients started calling and saying, “Hey, could that workshop we did last year, are we able to do that again this year, but clearly virtually?” And it made me, it forced me to look into it. It forced me to make a shift and just change the way I did things and to think creatively. And to really be like, “Okay, let me create this for them now.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

So like we said before the show, I have no idea what, I had not had experience doing a hybrid facilitation, but what’s interesting is I am not scared of it. I’m really excited because I know we can do it, I know we can do it, there’s tools out there. I know we as facilitators have the mindset to do it.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And I think the experience of redesigning, redeveloping and all that creation we had to deal all the past year built my confidence, whatever that hybrid looks like we’re going to nail this thing and we’re going to make it so amazing and great. So that’s where my mindset is in terms of logistics of how we’re going to do that. No idea, but that’s also exciting to me.

Douglas Ferguson:

No doubt. I think one of the strong messages I wanted to send with a guide was that, this is not a prescriptive guide, this is a set of considerations, as well as some ideas on how to solve some types of things that we’re going to run into.

Douglas Ferguson:

And we even encouraged people to reach out with feedback and with further ideas, because we want it to be a growing, ever expanding guide because we’re going to embark on a journey if you will or time period of experimentation, because there are no right or wrong answers, there are no best practices and we’re going to figure them out as we go.

Van Lai-DuMone:

As we’ve done. And what we were talking about before really plays into that, that this is a community that enjoys sharing and enjoys elevating our profession. So I’m excited to see what that guide is currently and what it becomes.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. Well, I think that lands us to a nice stopping point Van. And I want to thank you for the time today, and I’m excited to hear about all the work you’re doing and creativity, and just the enthusiasm you have for embarking on this next frontier of hybrid. It’s going to be fun times, I’m sure we’ll be comparing notes. And I wanted to give you a moment to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Sure. So I think what we didn’t touch upon is my work around curiosity and it plays into what we just talked about is this idea that like the world is clearly full of unknowns. But when we follow our curiosity, as what if in a forward thinking way, like what if I do X, Y, and Z, and then take small steps towards that curiosity, that’s how we create possibilities for ourselves and for others.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So that is a TEDx talk that I did about just right before we shut down and my TEDx talk is called “What If The Life-Changing Power Of Curiosity And Courage”, so you can go check that out. And I am always on LinkedIn, all day long, that’s my social media platform of choice and of addiction.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So find me on there, I love meeting new people. And then also if you’d like to follow my work and join us for some upcoming events, you can go to my website, worksmartadvantage.com, and join my newsletter called Curious About Creativity.

Douglas Ferguson:

Excellent. Well, I highly encouraged folks to check out the newsletter and any of your upcoming workshops, because not only does Van work with companies and the private workshops, she also periodically offers public workshops.

Douglas Ferguson:

So definitely worth checking out because this is really incredible stuff. And remember, there’s a difference between team building and team development and it’s worth doing, it will pay dividends. So thanks again Van for being on the show, it was a tremendous pleasure chatting with you.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Thanks, Douglas. Really enjoyed it.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I posted weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.

The post Episode 56: Normalize Creativity in the Workplace appeared first on Voltage Control.

What could you do, how great could you be if you weren’t afraid? The greatest prohibitor of growth in both our personal and professional lives is ourselves; we stand in our own way. Why? Most often it’s because we lack confidence in our abilities, or what is referred to as a confidence gap. We stop ourselves from achieving greatness because we don’t think we have what it takes to do so, however, we are often well equipped. Our disbelief in ourselves, therefore, keeps up from moving forward even if we have the skillset to succeed. 

The Confidence Gap

Everybody talks about a skills gap as the reason people do not reach their potential–the “gap” that exists between what an employee can actually do and the skills they need to do their job effectively. In other words, they need more knowledge to perform well on the job. However, I’ve found so often that it’s a confidence gap that prevents people most from making progress. Individuals fear that they do not know enough (even though they do) and are therefore not competent. For example, I hear facilitators say all of the time that they deal with imposter syndrome or the feeling that they are far less competent than other people perceive them to be. They feel that they are ill-equipped to lead a team or they question if they are the right person for the job. What this boils down to is a lack of confidence–disbelief in one’s own skills and know-how of what they’re doing, how they’re leading, how they’re showing up in the facilitation space. 

I also see this confidence gap in companies as a whole. It was evident in a Design Sprint we ran for Favor, the food delivery app. They already knew all of the information we presented them, but until the Design Sprint, they lacked the confidence to do the work. The workshop helped them get comfortable with doing the necessary work on their own. In this case, and in so many others I see, it’s not that people lack the knowledge or skill to do something, it’s that they’re not assured of their capability to execute it. 

It’s important to acknowledge that there are a lot of stereotypes and threats that can damage an individual’s confidence and therefore performance. Notably, statistics show that there is a confidence gap between men and women–disproportionately favoring men. A study by Cornell psychologist David Dunning and the Washington State University psychologist Joyce Ehrlinger showed that women avoid careers in science because they believe themselves to be less competent than men. In the study, women and men scored equally on a science quiz but women underestimated their performance because they thought less of their scientific reasoning abilities than men did. Linda Baker, professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, shares findings in her book Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide that demonstrate how damaging the implications of this confidence divide can be. In studies of business-school students, she found that men negotiate salary four times more than women do, and when women do negotiate they ask for 30% less money.

The Atlantic explored the gender-influenced confidence gap in their article ‘The Confidence Gap’: “Compared with men, women don’t consider themselves as ready for promotions, they predict they’ll do worse on tests, and they generally underestimate their abilities. This disparity stems from factors ranging from upbringing to biology.” It’s important to be aware of underlined factors that affect confidence so that you can help people remove them as roadblocks when necessary. 

Create a Culture of Confidence

Inspiring confidence in others is essential when you’re a leader. Team members that lack confidence do not perform as well and ultimately hold the entire team back. The best way to help people become comfortable with their skills, and thereby gain confidence, is to practice them. If you are leadership looking to help your team build confidence, one approach is to give them moments of practice. You can encourage building and practicing skills by creating groups or cohorts, building community, and/or establishing Slack groups for people to network and learn from each other. One real-world example of this is Cisco’s Change Lab. It’s a community that meets regularly to support and inspire its members. The group maintains momentum on progress and thereby builds confidence in their skills. 

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One way we offer skillset support and help grow confidence in facilitators at Voltage Control is with our weekly Facilitation Lab; it’s our “confidence booster” for the facilitation community. We intentionally create a safe space for facilitators to practice their skills and get comfortable with facilitation so that they can confidently execute their abilities in real-world situations. 

What are different ways you and your team can support one another to practice your craft and build confidence? Let’s look at a few effective ways leadership can instill confidence to get the most out of their team members.

1. Establish agency/authority of confidence in your team

When companies invest in their team, and more importantly transparently demonstrate to them that they are investing in them, it boosts teams’ confidence. Whether it’s investing time, money, or resources, gestures from authority that communicate, “You are worthwhile and I trust you to do this work,” are ultimately saying, “I have confidence in you.” Individuals tend to have more confidence in themselves when they feel supported by leadership. A real-world example is Adobe’s Kickbox program. It’s an initiative to enable employees to take an active role in their company’s innovation process by submitting and validating their own ideas. Team members receive boxes with necessary open-source materials to help them be more individually innovative. Included in the boxes is a credit card with money on it to support individuals’ ideas. Diana Joseph, former Senior Manager of Learning Research at Adobe, now CEO of the Corporate Accelerator Forum, says “the credit card in each Kickbox sends a clear message that the company trusts the employee — to do meaningful things when given the resources and to recognize what’s worth doing in the first place.  In other words, the company trusts you to lead.”

2. Create an intrinsically comfortable environment for people to grow 

While it’s necessary for people to practice their skills in order to get better, many people are afraid to do so. They fear that if they make a mistake it will reflect badly upon their capabilities. The irony is that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The only way to practice and build skills is to get comfortable with failing forward. Doing something is the only way to learn how to do it and failure inevitably accompanies it. When leadership creates a safe environment for people to try and fail, team members are more comfortable taking action. People need to know that leadership believes in them. Establish a foundation of psychological safety in your organization. Let team members know that not only is it okay for them to fail, but it’s encouraged because it’s how they grow. Prioritize growth over perfection. Team members feel supported and safe to build their skills when leadership shows that they value their growth and support its evolution. 

3. Break the Learning loop 

It’s one thing to think about what you want to learn or the skills you want to obtain and another thing entirely to actually experience learning them. The best way to learn is to learn by doing. You can know something cognitively, it can theoretically make sense, but it won’t completely “click” for you until you experience it for yourself. For example, say you want to learn how to throw a baseball. You can read about how to throw a baseball and understand how it works, but you won’t know how to do it until you actually try it for yourself. It’s imperative that you prioritize actionable learning–that is, learning skills by exercising them–to help people build confidence. The more people practice, the more capable they feel to execute, and the more confident they feel in their abilities. The more confident and capable they feel, the more they’ll want to practice to get better, and so on. It’s a loop that feeds into itself. You can help team members break the traditional learning loop by offering hands-on training and opportunities for them to learn by doing the work themselves. 

Overconfidence

While success positively correlates with confidence as much as it does competence, it’s important to consider “overconfidence”. Be wary of resistance to learning with people who are overconfident in their abilities. When someone overtly thinks they are an expert on a subject, they are less likely to welcome in new information: “I know everything there is to know; I’m an expert.” This mindset can actually lead to a decrease in performance. If individuals are blocking themselves from practicing and learning, they are not getting the essential learning-by-doing experience they need to continue growing. Someone may talk the talk, but can they walk the walk? Again, the only way to improve your skillset is to practice using it; do what you know to continue learning instead of just talking about what you know.

Now, overconfidence can also be beneficial if combined with humility and practice. When someone overestimates their abilities, is humble about it, and continues to practice their skill set, they are more likely to believe in themselves and therefore execute well. In this way, their overconfidence lays the way for them to continue learning because they feel that they are already competent to do so. Fear or lack of confidence does not stand in their way.  Their belief in themselves positively correlates with their willingness and capability to learn. 

Put on the training wheels, then take them off

So you’ve invested in your team to show them you have confidence in them, you’ve created a psychologically safe environment for them to grow in, and you’ve provided them with the support and tools they need to learn by doing. Now what? It’s important to keep the “training wheels” on–or offer the support team members need–until they feel they can roll without them. However, there is a delicate balance between offering support and holding peoples’ hands to a fault; there is an element of assistance as well as an element of “set them free”. Remember, the best way to learn is by doing. Offer necessary support along the way but leave room for people to try and fail. 

Get the most out of your team members (and yourself!) by intentionally fostering confidence and exercising your skills as often as you can. 

Practice Makes Competent

We offer an array of resources and opportunities for professionals (of all levels) to practice their skills and grow more confidence in them.

Community/Groups

• Weekly Facilitation Lab: a safe and experimental space for facilitators to learn, network, and evolve.
• Control the Room community: share experiences and learn from/with peers in the facilitation community. 

Resources

• Downloads: free custom tools & templates to run magical meetings. 
• MURAL & Miro templates: use our custom templates to run magical meetings and events.

Online Courses:

• Magical Meetings: learn how to run more effective and engaging meetings.
• Design Thinking Foundations: learn the key foundations in design thinking to better solve problems and seize opportunities.

Live Workshops

• Events calendar: join us for live training workshops and facilitation conferences. 

The post Bridge the Confidence Gap: How to Instill Confidence in Your Team appeared first on Voltage Control.

“I think leadership is really the art of correction, not perfection. We are going to get it wrong. Right? The question is: ‘How do you recover in those moments? Can you recover with grace, with curiosity? ‘”-Robin Anselmi

Robin Anselmi is the Chief Executive Officer at Conversant, a consulting agency that specializes in having high-quality conversations with team organizations and ultimately sets them up for success to achieve their biggest goals. She believes in the power of a grounded, connected leader to set the standard in growing together. Robin continues her mission at Conversant to reinforce the importance of human connection within organizations and striving towards innovation. As she encourages leaders to personify staying present, Robin reminds us to create the culture and strategy that works best for our own organization. The foundation resides in the quality of your team’s honest, authentic conversations.  

In this episode of Control the Room, Robin and I discuss the impact of presence in leaders leading to team innovation, the ongoing balance in assumptions, the leader’s unique challenge of correction instead of perfection, and the magnitude of a connected leader in its organization. Listen in to hear how Robin reveals the importance of human connection leading to authentic conversations, and the significance of a leader listening while remaining grounded in presence.

Show Highlights

[0:55] Robin’s Start in Key Company Conversations 
[6:12] The Impact of Presence to Lead to Innovation
[12:47] The Assumptions Take 
[15:52] The Art of Correction, Not Perfection 
[18:24] The Importance of a Leader’s Non-Defensive Approach
[23:11] A Complex World Requires a Connected Leader
[24:27] A Conversation on the Workforce Future Forward & Robin’s Final Thoughts 

Links | Resources

Robin’s LinkedIn
Conversant
Love: The Next Leadership Skill

About the Guest

Robin Anselmi is the Chief Executive Officer at Conversant. Her passion centers in helping organizations and leaders navigate quality communication and conversation while uncovering collaborative solutions. Over a decade, she has worked with and coached a wide range of Fortune 1000 companies and Global Philanthropic organizations. While remaining grounded in human connection, she is out to change the world one impactful conversation at a time. Robin is continuously inspired through her work in financial services, where she discovered a client’s impactful results ties directly to the importance of remaining well connected in what matters most for an organization’s employees and customers. With her early career start in engineering and manufacturing, Robin quickly developed a love for design. From there, she realized her true appreciation for the design in human connection and conversation. Robin continues her mission at Conversant by empowering leaders and reminding them that conversation is the most powerful skill set a leader can truly have. 

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through facilitation certifications, workshops, and events. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to The Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas:

Today I’m with Robin Anselmi, chief executive officer at Conversant, where she brings together the power and joy of authentic human connection to organizations worldwide. Robin has worked extensively with clients in financial services, healthcare and technology. Welcome to the show, Robin.

Robin Anselmi:

Thanks, Douglas. It’s great to be here.

Douglas:

So let’s get started with a little backstory. I’m really curious how you got your start helping companies have better conversations.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, I actually started my career as an engineer, which is always so weird to people. So I was an engineer in manufacturing for about a decade, making optical fiber. And everybody always says, “Well, how did you get from that to this?” I took a stop through financial services as an analyst. And along the way, I started to see that I was really interested in the interactions between human beings. And what did that lead to? And how did that actually cause more joy and greater results in organizations? And actually, they’re all related because as an engineer, it was the design of equipment. And how did the equipment work? As an analyst, it was the design of processes. And how did the processes work?

Robin Anselmi:

And this work really is about the design of human connection because there is a design. There’s a design to conversations that turn out well, and there’s a design to conversations that don’t. And if you actually start to understand the design of what brings people together to actually produce more than you might imagine, you can create that magic, quote, unquote, regardless of the circumstances. So too often, I think people think, “Well, you’ve got to be that charismatic leader.” I don’t think that’s true. I think if you understand the design of it, you can actually cause those surprising results with people by bringing them together in a way that honors and taps into that power and joy that comes out when people get together to make a meaningful contribution together.

Douglas:

That’s really interesting. I often talk to people about this notion of systems theory, or thinking of the world or the work from the perspective of systems, so I really want to hear your perspective on that, considering that to me, that’s what you’re talking about when you talked about there’s a design of equipment, there’s a design of processes. And then there’s the design of these interactions or these connections. To me, it’s considering the systems and the implications to the whole and these kinds of things.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, totally, because if you think about it, each human being is a complex system unto itself. And now you’re going to put a whole bunch of us together in a conference room and ask us to do stuff together. Of course, there’s going to be complexity in that. And too often, we try to solve it like it’s a complicated problem, like there is a best practice out there. There’s not. Often, it’s sample size of one. Each interaction is its own unique one. And can you actually be present to what’s happening for the other person? Can you be present to what’s happening for you, and the strategy and the culture that you’re all operating inside of? And too often, we sort of lose sight of all that. We just want to go down the path of: What’s the best practice?

Robin Anselmi:

I’m not saying there’s not places for best practices. Absolutely, there are. But really, so much of human interaction is being present to the other and what’s actually happening right now in this moment, particularly in these days with things changing so rapidly.

Douglas:

You just hit on something that’s very near and dear to my heart, which is the dangers of importing best practices. And I’m sure this shows up in your work all the time. I know it does ours because people always want us to train them or show them something tactics that’ll get the job done. And at the end of the day, we definitely need to get the tactics because we need repeatable things that we can do and make progress. The danger though is people always want to look external and say, “Well, what the right way to do this?” And so often, we need to curate something. We need to look very closely at the dynamics and put in something that’s best suited.

Douglas:

It reminds me of the strategy doing work where their analogy is taking people in a river rafting, river rafting guides. And it’s like, “We certainly haven’t gone down this river. And the river’s … Well, maybe I have gone down this river, but it’s certainly not behaving exactly like it did yesterday. So I’m not telling you exactly how we’re going to do this, but you trust me because I’ve gone down a river before, or I’ve climbed a mountain before, and so I might be a little bit helpful.” But we’ve still got to respond to some emergent qualities and understand what’s happening, so I don’t know. I get excited whenever someone’s preaching the dangers of best practices.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, I think tips and tricks are only going to take you so far. Right? So I always say, “Do I have some tips and tricks? Sure.” We all have them. We all have a few. And holy moly, can they get you into a lot of trouble because you can sort of start to rely on them so heavily. And to your river rafting example, maybe the current’s going way faster today than it normally does, and so that tip and trick is just not actually going to work for you in this situation. It’s why I think the number one job of leaders is to be present, to be present to what’s happening, to be present for themselves. So notice how they’re feeling the moment because actually, our bodies are telling us things all the time, and we’re just trying to sort of ignore it. And are we actually present to the other person? And are we legitimizing their experience in the conversations that they’re having with us?

Douglas:

I love that you threw out the word presence because literally, the word that was going through my mind was complacency. And that’s what the best practices can make us complacent. Right? We expect them to work and our brains shut off. But if we’re present and we’re really paying attention, that’s also kind of core to a lot of the principles and facilitation, inquiry versus advocacy. Right? We can’t really be in inquiry mode unless we’re present, curious, and our brain is fully functioning. We can’t active listen unless we’re really tuned in. And so that was awesome because I was literally thinking the problem is complacency, and then you went straight into presence.

Robin Anselmi:

One of the things we say is that people fast pass match, so they fast pass match things that they know from what’s happened, which again, as human beings, we need that. If I have to stop every time to think about how a doorknob works, I would never get out of my house. Right? So I need to be able to fast pass match on how a doorknob works. The challenge is that we fast pass match with people. You’re different than you were a year ago, five years ago. Right? But yet, we often treat each other like we’re the exact same person. And there are new things that you care about. There are new things that you worry about. And that’s going to show up in the way that we work together.

Robin Anselmi:

And too often, we skip past that. And so even the tips and tricks of, well, I know how Douglas is going to respond to this, no, I don’t. I don’t know who Douglas is today. Can I actually be really, in the spirit of inquiry, be really curious about what’s on his mind today?

Douglas:

That is such a beautiful concept of just not trying to anticipate. One of the things that I see so often as one of the, I’d say main issues of meetings is that people spend so much time thinking about what they’re going to say, or preparing their response, or their amazing rebuttal, or contribution, and they miss all of that awesomeness that they could be picking up on in the middle there.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, because that’s not actually listening. That’s waiting, so that’s somebody waiting their turn, as opposed to really listening and being in the conversation, and trusting that when we get to the pause, I’ll have something worthwhile to contribute. And if I don’t, somebody else will, and we’ll be smarter. We really genuinely will be smarter together without being able to predict. I think too often, to your point on that, people are driving to an outcome, so they’re actually not present because they’re trying to get something to happen. I’m trying to get you to see the world the way I see the world, as opposed to finding a new world view together, new solutions.

Robin Anselmi:

I read this thing, this quote, just today about the innovation and collaboration actually require us to sort of get into the messiness with each other. That’s not exactly the quote, it’s paraphrasing. But it does require that because I have to let go to really innovate or to collaborate, I have to let go of all of the ways that I see the world, or at least hold them loosely, and see the way you see the world. Otherwise, we’re just going to keep coming up with the answers that I came up with yesterday. Okay, that’s not innovation. 

Douglas:

That’s right. I love to tell people, if we don’t get into that exploration zone, where we’re looking at the intersections where ideas collide and can create new emergent permutations, then we’re just going to have the ordinary solutions. And what we’re always striving for are the novel solutions. Everyone wants the novel solutions, but we won’t get there unless we allow that to happen.

Robin Anselmi:

Because it’s really uncomfortable. I think this is the thing that people want it to be rainbows and unicorns and fun and happy, happy, glitter, joy. Right? It’s actually not. It’s really, really uncomfortable because I have to actually be willing to say, “Wow, my way of doing this, or my way of seeing this, there might be a better way. There might be another alternative. The way I’ve been doing it might not be sufficient for the future.” Right? And so that’s actually really uncomfortable for folks because you have to let go of the known and be willing to go into a place of uncertainty, and also a willingness that, oh, maybe that thing that I thought was the bee’s knees just isn’t.

Douglas:

That brings up two thoughts. One is that can be really disorienting and difficult for a leader because especially if you’ve been relied on and looked upon and expected to have the vision, and then now we’re at a point where we’re having a conversation, and now someone’s pushing things a little bit in a direction that might conflict with parts of your vision. Is that something you need to hold steadfast to, so that we stay true to the vision? Or is that something we’ve got to let go of? And I think that is very difficult because sometimes you do need to stay the course because, no, that’s actually going to steer us away from our values, and that’s something we need to hold onto.

Douglas:

But I think that’s something that leaders should spend a lot of time meditating and thinking about, so when they’re confronted with that moment, they don’t just react, they know. If you’ve thought about it enough and you’ve really decided what’s germane to the success, then you’re prepared to hold steadfast versus actually let go of something.

Robin Anselmi:

One of the distinctions we make for people that I find is helpful is really pulling apart the difference between purpose, you might say vision. What’s the why, the outcomes? What do you want the what to be? And then the methods. Right? Often, leaders, we get really tied up around the methods. Can I be a little more agnostic about the how, provided that it’s moving in the direction of sort of purpose or vision, going to create the outcomes I’m looking for? I would add sort of values, sort of corporate values or ethics around that to sort of guide the decisions that we’re making. But can I free us to actually think about different ways of doing it? And you’re right. There’s such a challenge around the places where it pushes the boundary on the vision. Is it taking us off course, or is it taking us in a better course? And I think that’s the job of leadership on an ongoing basis.

Robin Anselmi:

And when I say leadership, I don’t mean in a single person. I mean from an organizational standpoint to be able to say, “Where do we want to go together? And how do you make decisions about changing course?” I don’t think there’s an easy answer to that one.

Douglas:

Absolutely not. But most fun work is not easy and requires some thought. And I think that’s actually why it’s going to be hard for computers to completely replace us.

Robin Anselmi:

I hope so, anyway.

Douglas:

So I’m going to come back to something you said earlier, which is fascinating, which is this notion that these, I think it also alludes to, or ties back to the thinking fast or thinking slow, and the system one, system two, around there’s some moments where we really need to rely on instincts and patterns and assumptions. And if we weren’t able to assume that the fellow drivers on the road were going to stop at the red light, it would be really strange, or would take a lot longer to get from point A to point B because we’d be very anxious going through every intersection. Right? But the trick is when, what’s the boundary around assumptions that are safe for us to carry, and which ones we need to kind of be a little more cognizant of.

Robin Anselmi:

It’s so interesting. I think for leaders, this is an ever evolving question about making their implicit thinking explicit to people as often as possible. Right? And so the rules of the road, there’s a lot that’s already been made explicit, and we all know that it was made explicit because we all have a license in our pocket that says we took that class, or we passed that test. But in organizational life, I think there are way fewer things that are actually quite that explicit, but I think we assume that it is. And so I think actually pausing to make sure that we’re on the same page is a worthy investment of time. Right? Because you’re going to have to have those conversations at some point.

Robin Anselmi:

Do you want to have them in the beginning, before things have gotten messy, and everyone’s off track and pissed off and annoyed at each other? Or do you want to have it later when sort of everything’s gone to hell in a hand basket? So you’re going to have to really get to the point of clarity and testing it. I think language is tricky because we live in language, we work in language, it’s how work gets done today is in sort of conversations. We say the conversations are the work, and people assume really quickly what each other means by certain words. Right now, strategy’s one of those words that drives me a little crazy because everybody will say, “Well, we need a strategy. Or are we aligned on the strategy?” But if you stop and ask five people what they mean by strategy, you will get 12 answers about what that actually means.

Robin Anselmi:

And so I think you’re right. I don’t think it’s a simple straightforward thing around here’s the things about you can assume to be true, and here’s the things you can’t. I think that’s a constant exploration between people. And adding to the mix that we’re now sort of hybrid, so we’ve got people in person and people virtual. Add into the mix multi generational workforces, where there’s different levels of assumptions around what work norms are. I think there’s just going to be a lot of places for us to keep being explicit about our thinking on things, and not assuming that they’re going to stop at the red light.

Douglas:

Yeah. The multi generational thing is a fascinating one because you’ve also got these elements of what’s acceptable from equity and from expectations around just language. I look at … This even comes up when we’re working with clients that may have younger workforce. And when I watch how sensitive they are to certain moves and certain language, and how vocal they are about it, it’s quite a bit different. And I see a lot of folks that have been in the workforce a bit longer, where norms were different, and even turns of phrase and business jargon, that now is offensive to a younger workforce, and especially when you’re looking at M&A where two cultures are just being forced together pretty quickly. That’s kind of tough to navigate, and definitely not easy because even when you’ve got folks that have the best of intentions, people can find actions very offensive.

Robin Anselmi:

I think leadership is really the art of correction, not perfection. We are going to get it wrong. Right? The question is: How do you recover in those moments? Can you recover with grace, with curiosity? Back to your point earlier, right? And it’s hard because if I say something that’s someone else finds offensive, I immediately get defensive about that, as opposed to: Can I just get curious about, oh, that’s interesting, can you say more about that? Can you say, “What am I not seeing in that, so that I can understand it better?” And I think that’s hard for leaders to do, and it’s such a critical skill to really understand another’s point of view and the way they see the world, and the way the world occurs to them. I’m never going to full understand what it’s like to be you, or you, me. But I can be curious about it and really see, okay, and apologize and do better.

Douglas:

I love that Maya Angelou quote, it’s like, “Do as good as you know. And when you know better, do better.”

Robin Anselmi:

Do better. That’s right. Know better, do better. That’s right.

Douglas:

And I love what you just said about this notion of not perfection.

Robin Anselmi:

But correction.

Douglas:

It’s about correction.

Robin Anselmi:

Yeah, correction.

Douglas:

I’m a big fan of the notion of continuous improvement.

Robin Anselmi:

That’s right.

Douglas:

Always being curious about how we can move toward a better.

Robin Anselmi:

A better.

Douglas:

And definitely, the curiosity piece. But I want to come back to something that you were saying about that as well, which is not being defensive. And that’s something I learned, because I had some moments just navigating a lot of this as a public figure and running public workshops, and being in front of folks, which had some moments that were surprising because I do my best to support people. And I’ve considered myself an ally. And it’s like, “Whoa. Right? I’m the target? How’s this?” And I quickly realized that’s the worst reaction that anyone could possibly have because what people don’t want to have is an ally trying to be a victim because me not being understood, my intentions being misinterpreted, pales in comparison to how they’ve been victimized. Right?

Douglas:

And so when you mention not being defensive, and also having that humility truly struck a chord is how important that is, and I learned the lesson personally. And then also, I think another little adjacent thing that might be fun to unpack with you is this notion earlier when you talked about the charismatic leader. And I would say charismatic leaders probably struggle with that the most because their identity is about being this charismatic, loved, worshiped individual. I men, worship might be a bit overkill, but you get the idea.

Robin Anselmi:

No, but hero, hero. They probably … The hero.

Douglas:

Yeah, the hero. Yeah. And so you compare that to leaders that are maybe entrepreneurial leaders, or facilitative leaders, or servant leaders. I think all of those have a little bit more humility in the mix. And it might be, if you’re following that path, it might be easier to respond and employ some of these skills.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, I want to comment on a couple of things you said. So number one, that defensiveness that you said, welcome to the human race because that’s actually just programmed into us. Right? So it’s not your own personal dysfunction. All of us when confronted have a natural reaction to defend ourselves. It’s actually just hardwired into the way that our brains work. Right? And so if you think about it from an evolution standpoint, it makes a lot of sense about why we would need to do that, to protect ourselves and keep ourselves safe, and that we can’t distinguish between physical threat and social threat, so that’s sort of the normal.

Robin Anselmi:

Goes back to my thing earlier about being present. Can I actually just be present to what’s happening? And that this thing that just got said didn’t actually harm me. Right? It might’ve harmed my ego, it might’ve hurt my feelings, but it didn’t actually harm me. Can I just take a breath and get connected to: Okay, what about that is upsetting to me? Because most of the time, it’s something as you said, in the scheme of things, probably not the right thing to be centered on, so that’s one, so welcome to the human race because we all are going to be defensive.

Robin Anselmi:

The distinction we make is between superior leadership and connected leadership. So superior leaders are the ones who think they have to have all the answers. Right? And there is a model for that. There are places actually where superior leadership is necessary. I kid a lot and say, “If the fire alarm goes off in an office building, I’d like there to be somebody who knows the way out of the building. And yes, I’m just going to follow them.” I don’t want to have to have a whole conversation about what’s the right way out of a fire. But in today’s world where things are moving so fast, we need more connected leaders because it’s really hard for a single person to see the whole view, to see the whole elephant. Back to systems, a single person really can’t understand all of the interactions and all of the interplay of what’s going to happen.

Robin Anselmi:

So leaders who are connected, connected to people, so connected and connecting people, connected and connecting to strategy and to culture and to current circumstances, are the ones who are going to be successful in these more complex systems because that superior leader, hero leader model, yes, quite charismatic. But that’s a hard row to hoe, to have all of those people who are going to be able to … You’re going to be able to know everything that they know and make the best decisions. I’m not sure that model is going to last much longer in most of our organizations. There’s just too much complexity.

Douglas:

The thing I think about is situation, time and place. To me, there’s situations where a hero leader might be needed, like the fire alarm example you were talking about. And I think those examples will still be there. In fact, someone was just talking with me about the vaccine rollout here in the US, how chain of command is kind of helpful when you’re trying to execute something very specific and with some rules. And we know what we want to do, and we figured it out, and we’re just going to go do it.

Douglas:

Now there might be moments within that, there might need to be some freedom, some flexibility for folks to flex and move around some of the things. But at some of the points, we’re going to need, and so it makes me think of the Cynefin Model, and how in a complex world, the superior leader’s going to be very ineffective. In a simple, obvious world, maybe we do need someone to step up and say, “Run this checklist.”

Robin Anselmi:

Totally.

Douglas:

And maybe in the complicated, maybe there’s something in between.

Robin Anselmi:

Totally. In the simple world, a superior leader is great. Right? Do this, here’s the answers. Goes back to your thing earlier about best practices. There are knowable answers and you can have somebody that knows them and just moves everybody in that direction, absolutely. Even in a complicated world. Right? There are lots of answers, having somebody that can sort of sort those and come up with smart answers, move us forward, great. I just think more and more, what we’re seeing in organizations is much more complexity, things that are much less predictable, much less likely to be known or knowable, that you’ve got to be willing to be in a place where the strategies are emergent. And to have strategies that are emergent, you have to be really listening to the people in the system, which I think to your point, is a whole lot harder for that hero leader to do.

Douglas:

So let’s talk about something that’s emerging right now, that companies are faced with. This is a complex issue that we’re having to solve for, and I think it might be kind of fun to unpack it from that perspective around: How can we best have these conversations? And what are some of the wrinkles that we’re going to need to consider? What makes it so complex? And that’s the back to the office, so one of the things that came up in the pre show chat was just around the gender equity issues that are going to unfold with kind of expecting employees to come back.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, I think going back to sort of complicated or simple models, the office as it stood before was a way of making sure people were doing their job, so there was a lot of sort of oversight, supervision. I think the last year has proven that we don’t need that to the same degree. And so I think it’s going to require organizations redefining the purpose of the office. So why? Why do we want people to gather? What’s the purpose of that? And I do think there are going to be some equity issues around that. I strongly believe that the organizations that are going to be the most successful going forward in hiring and retaining talent are going to have to have some sort of flexibility. They’re not going to be an all or neither. There’s going to be some sort of hybrid model, where there’s X number of days a week or something because you’ve got so much diversity in terms of what people want, in terms of being back in the office or not.

Robin Anselmi:

And there’s been some recent articles and reports that are guessing that there may be some gender equity issues about that, around who chooses to come back to office versus who doesn’t, and whether or not you’ll see that more women choose not to come back to the office. And what does that do? Do we suddenly recreate the boys’ clubs of days past? Well, I hope most of them are days past, of people in the office. And is there a different level of connection, or knowledge, or perceptions about people who are together in that space and opportunities for them? And what’s that going to do for folks who make different choices about where they’re going to be located?

Douglas:

Yeah. There’s quite a few layers there because there are folks that have now shifted their patterns, their needs, and demands from their family may have shifted. Also, there are people who have invested in home office setups. There are people that are still working on the kitchen counter. So I think we have to anticipate a diverse set of needs.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, you’re going to have people that are longing, can’t wait to get back to the office, are so tired of being, feeling isolated, or to your point, they don’t have the space that they’d love to have to work. You have others who hope to never go back to an office. Right? And so I think it’s going to be a challenge for organizations to legitimize both points of view to find answers because honestly, in the past, it was really easy to say, “Oh, you can’t do this job from home.”

Robin Anselmi:

Back to your tips and tricks, you could kind of rely on the, well, that’s just not how it’s done here. There are very few places where that’s not how it was done in the last year, year and a half. Right? And so it’s going to be a lot harder to just rely on that’s the policy, or that’s just the way we do it. You’re going to have a lot more people that are going to be challenging that. And so I think really looking at: What’s the vision for the space? What’s the organization’s values? How does space actually enhance the values? How is it a physical representation of the things that an organization says they care about? May require us to rethink how we’re using that space too.

Douglas:

Yeah. It’s not only individual contributors. Leaders, executives have now got a taste of what it’s like and what’s possible, so they can no longer deny or convince themselves that it doesn’t work because they’ve now seen it work, and they know it’s possible. And their behavior’s going to change. And I was talking to a senior executive from a very large financial institution just last week. And he was telling me how not having to commute essentially two and a half hours a day changed his life tremendously. He could decide whether he wanted to spend more time working, he could spend more time with the family. That was now discretionary time for him that he could use to improve his career, improve his family life. And I don’t think that’s going to be something he’s going to give up easily. And this is someone that has political power within the organization. It’s not just someone who’s just at the mercy of the whims of the deciders. So I think we’re going to see some really interesting models unfold as people start to wrangle some of these issues and lay out policies.

Douglas:

And it also comes down to how we support our people from a mental and social wellbeing. There’s a lot of trauma that people have experienced that they’re going to have to confront because we’re still in the mode of, we’re still in the fight. We’re not in recovery yet. And so as soon as things shift and we start to think about how we … What does post … I don’t even know if post pandemic even makes sense because I think it might be something, it might be a new way of life taking vaccines every quarter, or every other quarter, or something. But we’ll see how it all unfolds. But I do think that we might see a shift where people start to acknowledge that, oh, wow, I did go through something traumatic, and I need to work through this. And I think leaders are going to have to think about how to have those conversations.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, we were saying pre show about one of my colleagues, Kell Delaney, has said, “We are not the same people that we were in January of 2020.” None of us are. We all have different things that we think about and consider. We have different … Well, all of us have different habits, whether or not those are all good can be left to debate. But we do, we all have different ways of being in the world, and certainly different ways of working. And if we think we’re just flipping a switch to go back, or just take that forward, I think that’s short sighted. I don’t think that’s how it’s going to work out. And to your point, I think you’re going to have people at varying sort of stages in their thinking about how they want to work and what that’s going to look like.

Douglas:

This is something we also talked about a little earlier, this concept of leaders becoming leaders because they were really good at a thing. They were the best at the thing. And then they become leaders, they’re not necessarily trained in how to have good meetings. They’re not trained in how to have good conversations, don’t necessarily understand coaching models. Also, typically, they might have been a supervisor before they were even promoted into becoming an official leader. So there might’ve been kind of their job as a supervisor would’ve been more focused on the task. And now that they’re responsibilities have grown, and they’re expected to have these conversations, it can be pretty disorienting. And how do we begin to have performance conversations, conversations about wellbeing and equity?

Robin Anselmi:

Well, and I think from earlier, a lot of leaders sort of do come up in a superior leader mindset, like as a manager, I’m supposed to have the answers. The coaching models, all of them, really are based in: Well, what if I don’t have to have the answers? What if we have to have the answers? What would the answers look like if we crafted them together? And so I honestly think if managers could let go of just one thing, which is that they have to be the one that knows the answer, it would make all the difference. That if it really is, no, we get to work out the answers together as human beings, and really find ones that work, inside of constraints. All organizations are going to have some level of constraints. This isn’t anarchy where you get to do whatever the hell you want, and I get to do whatever the hell I want.

Robin Anselmi:

But if we have a shared purpose and we know what the outcomes are that we’re driving to, can we get creative about what would work for you and what would work for me? And I think if leaders could really let go of, it has to be my way, or I have to have the answer, we could all get smarter together about how to solve those problems.

Douglas:

That’s also very liberating as a leader.

Robin Anselmi:

It is.

Douglas:

It’s exhausting.

Robin Anselmi:

It’s exhausting to think I have to know everything.

Douglas:

And stressful to have all the answers.

Robin Anselmi:

That’s right. That’s right.

Douglas:

And most of the time, I don’t know, if your experience was anything like mine, it was super anxiety provoking too because I kind of felt like it was expected. It wasn’t like I wanted to do it. I felt like that’s what everyone was hoping, so that I would show up as the CTO and know all the CTO things.

Robin Anselmi:

Can you just fix this?

Douglas:

The minute … Yeah. Right. And the minute that I found the liberty in asking, “What do you think we should do?”

Robin Anselmi:

Shocking.

Douglas:

Right? An employee comes to you needing, wanting your advice, and just asking them, “What do you think we should do?” Because a lot of times they know what they would do in your absence. They’re maybe assuming that you want to be involved, or they’re afraid they’re going to get it wrong. Just turning it back on them and giving them the opportunity to just say it empowers them to go with their gut. And then next time, they might not even stop to answer you, so then that’s one less thing that you’re pulled out of or pulled into.

Robin Anselmi:

Absolutely. Whenever the stress gets high, I think as human beings, we tend to contract. So when stress goes up, we tend to sort of pull in closer. The reality is if you actually expand the conversations in those moments, so if under stress, we actually went to more people, asked somebody else for help, the vast majority of the time, we actually really will get smarter together because to your point, somebody else will see it different than I do. So I’m stuck in my own thinking as a leader. I’m worried, I have all this stress. I’m worried about getting it right. If I go and ask somebody else, they don’t have that same stress in that moment, so they might actually be a whole lot smarter than me about what could be possible.

Douglas:

I love that. It makes me think of this notion that I personally have always found. It’s often easier, especially if you’re in the moment of writer’s block, or you just kind of creative block, if you got inspiration flowing, it’s a lot easier to filter. I can say, “That doesn’t meet the values. That’s off vision.” And helping guide and direct things that are kind of coming at you, versus having to create it all. And so to your point, in that moment of tension, if the instinct is to clam up, then the only inspiration you got is what’s inside, versus opening it up and letting the stuff flow at you. And then you can kind of just filter and curate.

Robin Anselmi:

And find, back to the innovation conversation, find that new answer that you might not have ever dreamed of on your own.

Douglas:

Yeah, or even look. You can be looking out for interesting combinations. What if I put this and this together?

Robin Anselmi:

That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.

Douglas:

That’s cool.

Robin Anselmi:

Yeah, really great.

Douglas:

Awesome. Well, I think that takes us to an interesting place to kind of hit the pause button on this conversation, and want to just give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Robin Anselmi:

Yeah. For me, I think it really is that there is power and joy in human connection and that if we spend too much time at work in the bulk of our lives to not be able to tap into that joy, and that you can find it if you actually expand the conversations. And if you want to find out more or get some inspirations, if you go to conversant.com, you can subscribe to our newsletter. And we send out some monthly tips and information and videos, just to help inspire folks to find that power and joy in their work.

Douglas:

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Robin. This has been a pleasure chatting. And I hope people do check out Conversant, and looking forward to talking to you again sometime soon.

Robin Anselmi:

Thanks for having me, Douglas. This was super fun.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.

The post Episode 48: A Leader’s Power in Presence appeared first on Voltage Control.

Have you ever stopped to think about the world’s work culture–really thought about it? We’re so used to the way things are, that it’s easy to forget that our workhorse mentality isn’t how it always used to be. That is, not until the Industrial Revolution. It wasn’t until this transitional era to new manufacturing processes that work culture evolved to meaning more hours equated to more work, and therefore more money; i.e. time is money. 

Stanley Gen. McChrystal tells the eye-opening origin story of this mental construct in his phenomenal book, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement For a Complex World, which he wrote to help leaders make their teams more adaptable, unified, and successful in the wake of change. In the book, McChrystal tells the story of Fredrick Taylor, an integral player during the industrial revolution for his contributions to improve industrial efficiency. It was Taylor who began the seeming correlation between time and money creating success. He used to go into factories and use stopwatches to figure out the fastest way to do something “reductionist”. The pressure we feel to work more hours to achieve success is ingrained in us, and it’s running us down. Our society operates on this mental construct. We’re still dealing with the aftershock of the Industrial Revolution, but it’s not the best way to get things done. We aren’t our best when we’re overworked or doing the same thing day in and day out. 

However, there is a crack in the matrix. We are ushering in a new era. An era where the quality of work due to great work-life balance and sound mental health is far more important. An era where leadership looks more like coaching and less than dictatorship. Leaders are beginning to understand the importance of possessing excellent facilitation skills to bring out the best in their employees. 

Companies are transitioning their business, from tip to tail, to align with the evolving digital age; instead of command and control, leadership is focused on helping employees adapt to a changing environment. Leaders are learning to cultivate new energy, innovation, and unity amongst their teams. In other words, facilitation is a SUPER critical skill to learn if you want your business to operate at top performance. 

This is a call to bring out the inner facilitator in everyone: we need people that help us humans be human because the computers (that are slowly taking over) are going to do everything else. 

I started to think about all of the leaders across industries outside of facilitation and what makes them great. These leaders, from the military to sports to mental health, possess traits of great facilitators. They realize we are operating in a new paradigm and we need to step into that with new perspectives and new approaches. These leaders are curious and experiment towards better outcomes. They include. They motivate. The ignite.

Let’s look at 49’s coach Bill Walsch as an example. Bill was amazing at helping folks realize they CAN do it.

“The four most powerful words are: I believe in you.” – Bill Walsch

He taught his teams that if you go into the game assuming you will lose or assuming you have already lost, then you won’t play a good game. This is especially noteworthy because this approach helped Walsch turn the worst team in the league into the best. He always coached from the perspective that the team can always turn things around. “The ability to help the people around me self-actualize their goals,” he said, “underlines the single aspect of my abilities and the label that I value most — teacher.” He also focused heavily on improvement. “I directed our focus less to the prize of victory than to the process of improving — obsessing, perhaps, about the quality of our execution and the content of our thinking; that is, our actions and attitude. I knew if I did that, winning would take care of itself.”

Walsch’s effective leadership approach is that of a facilitator, guiding his team to cultivate each individual’s best performance so that they thrive when they come together as a whole. He understands the power of a coach mentality–one that encourage’s each player’s development while simultaneously facilitating problem-solving admist change. This is what expert coaching, no matter the industry, looks like:

“For members of your team, you determine what their inner voice says. The leader, at least a good one, teaches the team how to talk to themselves. An effective leader has a profound influence on what that inner voice will say.”

Yes, Walsch is a coach by title. But he also represents the next set of bosses. Rather than traditional bosses, they are going to be coaches. Group coaching is #3 on Forbe’s list of top 5 leadership development trends for 2020. “In this new decade, everyone needs to be a leader who actively engages their people. Awareness of this will see leadership development pushed down through the organization, and coaching will become a standard part of every manager’s experience.”

This shift is critical. Knowledge work is like playing a game. While there are rules and procedures, ultimately we are “playing” against humans that are cunning and attempting different things. We need leaders to help us play the game.

Now consider a factory, where things are predictable. They work the same way every single day. Leaders and managers can simply run a checklist and prescribe a “best way of doing things”. That’s not the case when we are a complex adaptive system. This is where we find ourselves these days. Knowledge work that we engage in and even the shifting landscape requires us to learn and adapt, meaning we can’t simply just do what we did yesterday. This requires a leadership style that nurtures. Like a gardener. 

While leaders who coach may impart wisdom, much of what they do is about removing barriers, whether physical or mental. Let’s be front runners in this transition and boost up folks to shine so that we may all do our best. Ready to get started? At Voltage Control, we help enterprises scale change. We facilitate and coach large diverse groups toward shared understanding and transform cultures to sustain innovation. If you have a project that is having trouble getting traction or will require input from lots of people, let us coach you through the process. Contact us today. 

The post Lessons from how non-business leaders lead appeared first on Voltage Control.

How many work meetings do we fondly remember?

This was a thought I had after attending yet another meeting that felt pointless. An hour went by, some people were there in person but not really there (they were on their phones), we weren’t sure who was facilitating the meeting, and the agenda was loose. We didn’t get any work done.

These memes do a great job of explaining how I felt:

I think it is safe to say that most work meetings are like this. If you are lucky, your meeting has a clear agenda and involves a small group of participants who aren’t distracted. If you are really fortunate, the meeting has an excellent facilitator who keeps everyone in the room enthusiastic, and you all focus on getting work done in the meeting.

But let’s be real here, a lot of the meetings we attend are pointless. How common is this problem? Ready to have your mind blown?

Pointless meetings will cost companies $541B in 2019.

$541B…What!? When I first looked at these numbers, I just about spit out my coffee. I read into the report put together by Doodle, and it was clear that the magnitude of the problem was real. I haven’t been looking at meetings the same.

I have been pondering on how the cost of terrible meetings could accumulate to such an enormous amount. On a recent walk, I thought through some basic math on how the cost of a useless 1-hour meeting can add up so quickly.

We might think of a 1-hour meeting as a 1-hour cost to our company, but that isn’t true unless there is only 1 person there, which doesn’t make it a meeting.

If it is an 8-person meeting, it is really an 8-hour meeting because it is using up an hour of each person’s quality attention. If it is a pointless meeting without a facilitator helping everyone get work done, that is 8-hours of quality work taken from the organization. One pointless meeting can add up to an entire workday wasted.

Considering the cost of just a single 8 person, 1-hour meeting, it is no longer a shock to me that ~24 billion hours will be lost to pointless meetings in the next year. We all have felt the pain of a meeting where no quality work was accomplished. I was intrigued that the Doodle report discovered that 100% of the report’s participants (a combination of 6,528 professionals and analysis of over 19 million meeting responses) described poorly organized meetings as a waste of time or money.

So what is the solution to a poorly organized meeting that ends up feeling pointless?

A facilitator who knows how to conduct room intelligence.

The business meetings that I still feel fond of involved a facilitator who helped us all get work done in the meeting. We didn’t feel like we had our time stolen from us, but that we had jumped ahead on our progress. A facilitator who has the skills to control a room is essential for a meeting to be progressive rather than painful.

I feel one of the few good reasons to hold a meeting is that the collective intelligence in a room is stronger than one participant. No single person is smarter or more creative than the whole room, and this is why we have meetings. We want to gather to harness that collective intelligence and get work done. But another gathering without a facilitator will likely end up feeling pointless.

A great meeting facilitator conducts a room of specialists just like a conductor holds a symphony together. They both control the room. A meeting without a facilitator is like a symphony without a conductor.

A facilitator who conducts a room well is competent at:

• Protecting the room from distractions
• Guiding everyone through a clear and timely set of discussions and activities
• Controlling the room by conducting everyone around the same focal point
• Creating an even playing field so that they can extract the wisdom from all participants, regardless of personality type
• Holding space for people to feel psychologically safe as participants
• Using an array of exercises that keep everyone engaged and entertained
• Ensures the meeting ends with accomplishment and limited ambiguity

To help rid us of shitty meetings that waste our time, we need better facilitators.

A meeting without a facilitator is like a symphony without a conductor.

Our ability to facilitate meetings, both virtual and in-person, is a vital skill for the dynamic, decentralized, autonomous work we all participate in today. Can we imagine if we start doing quality work in the meetings? Can we imagine looking forward to a meeting because we feel assured there is a facilitator who will help foster room intelligence to get alignment, direction, and progress on the project our team is enthusiastic about?

Paul Axtell, author of Meetings Matter shares that,

“Any collective that masters the art of leading (and participating in) effective meetings will see an array of tangible benefits in completing projects to time and budget, achieving their specific strategic aims, and doing all of this with less human resource — which are all directly related to successful communication..”

The companies and people who become facilitators of effective meetings will thrive and preserve positive work cultures.

As a facilitator myself, I have been successful in using several methods and principles to control a room and run more effective meetings.

• I use the “Note and Vote” from Design Sprints to prevent groupthink.
• I deploy Liberating Structures for helping a team make entertaining, collaborative decisions. They enable tiny shifts in the way we meet, plan, decide and relate to one another.
• I lead with a “Do the work in the meeting, not after” viewpoint
• I follow the “No Prototype No Meeting” philosophy from Dennis Boyle.
• On calendar invites, I replace the word “meeting” with titles like “prototype review”, “make [something you need to make] session”, or “pivot or persevere decision”. The reason is to prevent us from just having a meeting where we semi-update each other and instead come to the meeting with something to review, make, or decide on — which in theory should lead to less “meetings.

I am constantly learning and trying out new methods for running effective meetings because I want to be a great facilitator. A great facilitator helps prevent a meeting from procreating — one meeting leading to another meeting leading to yet another meeting. A great facilitator extracts room intelligence and makes the most of the group in the room.

A great facilitator helps prevent a meeting from procreating.

There isn’t one way to control a room and run an effective meeting. In fact, there are hundreds of proven methods and frameworks that any leader can benefit from.

I realized that I am not alone in wanting to save us from yet another pointless meeting. It is why we started Control The Room. Control The Room is a Facilitator Summit with the goal of bringing together facilitators of all kinds to build rapport, learn, and grow together. An intimate gathering for people to actively upgrade their facilitation skills so they can get quality work done in their meetings.

I will be there sharing facilitation skills and learning from other facilitators so that we can all help reduce the enormous cost associated with ineffective meetings. I hope you will attend and take your learnings back to your meetings.

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